"We need more welders and less philosophers," Rubio said, making the argument that vocational skills like welding are more valuable than abstract skills like philosophy.

But as Fusion's Felix Salmon and others pointed out, philosophers actually tend to make more money than welders — think billions — and people with philosophy degrees have a way of becoming wildly successful.

Republican presidential candidate and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has a dual degree in philosophy and medieval history from Stanford.

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Carl Icahn, the activist investor who's worth over $20 billion, got his philosophy degree from Princeton. His thesis had the snappy title "The Problem of Formulating an Adequate Explication of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning."

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Slack — the $2 billion dollar startup — is helmed by Steward Butterfield, a man with not one but two philosophy degrees. He says the discipline helped him refine his thinking.

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Essayist Susan Sontag studied philosophy at the University of Chicago and Harvard before changing the way people think about everything from photography to AIDS.

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Hedge fund manager George Soros earned a philosophy PhD from the London School of Economics. Now worth $24 billion, Soros studied under the empiricist Karl Popper.

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Civil rights activist Angela Davis studied under the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse while at Brandeis University.

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LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman — yet another billionaire — earned a masters in philosophy from Oxford. He wanted to become an academic before going into tech.

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Alex Trebek studied philosophy at the University of Ottawa before hosting the most successful game show ever.

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'Royal Tenenbaums' director Wes Anderson earned a degree in philosophy from the University of Texas, where he met frequent collaborator Owen Wilson.

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David Foster Wallace, author of "Infinite Jest" and maybe the finest novelist of the past 30 years, studied one of the most discerning branches of philosophy — logic.